by Kate Holden
THE TURNBULL FAMILY, BETWEEN them, ran more than half a dozen properties, as well as other financial interests. They managed staff, maintained expensive machinery, purchased huge quantities of chemical fertiliser and pesticides. They had houses, frequently unoccupied while they visited other residences, and gardens to keep trim. There were fleets of vehicles, shedding, roads to maintain. Portions of interest in family companies and projects had to be negotiated, contracts signed. Actual farming practice needed devising: what to plant, a choice of fertiliser, the timing on each of the properties; which harvests to collect, silo and sell each year. Regulations required all those permissions. Lawyers needed to write letters. There was personal family business, too: the school fees, the normal household bills and projects. Tax returns were a nightmare. The farmhouses had offices crammed with paper.
The mythos has largely gone from Australian farming now. Too much talk from cityfolk of ‘extraction’, ‘resource management’, ‘exploitation’: rapacious terms that turn noble labour into pillage. Farming landscapes are blanks of hedge-fund investment, belonging to diffuse shareholder ciphers embodied on digital screens, or processing plants full of mutilated animals manipulated through their lifecycles according to economics, or the relic endeavours of family farms staggering in the gusts of market demands. There is so little room for ‘non-essentials’ such as dialogue with the landscape or sentimental instinct for biophilia, intergenerational heritage of native ecologies, stewardship of the scrappy scrub. Anyway, why would anyone need a relationship with a landscape as dull as asphalt?
There is a melancholy to it now, even the victimhood narrative souring, pesticide cancers and suicide quiet killers where once there were spearings, falls from horses, bushrangers and snakebite. In marketing, affable, squinting and behatted farmers are more and more often portrayed against setting suns.
Some farmers – busy clearing remnant native vegetation and spraying the soil, inserting seed with needles, watering and tending to crops, reaping silofuls of grain and cereals – do not often notice the progress from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘threatened’ to ‘critically endangered’ when it comes to the animal and plant populations on their blocks. They do not perceive the blank and denuded land they’ve made. The vision they see is that printed in high-saturation on cereal packets, tourist pamphlets, annual reports and investment prospectuses: wide, wonderful fields of grain worked by glossy tractors, building ‘wealth’, feeding the nation, continuing the work of usefully occupying this country.
It took a long time for things to flip, but in the past fifty years the Australian state has inverted – or at least complicated – its traditional roles. Now government encourages industry, even while it has a responsibility to protect the land from the very incursions of industry. This leads to strange alliances, like farmers and conservationists equally opposed to development, mining or the despoliation of the country’s natural assets. Citizens are as likely to barricade themselves against government-authorised coal-seam gas exploration licences, dozers relentlessly pushing trees on behalf of the state, as government compliance officers who are there to safeguard the native life of the country.
We are in a long moment when all parties are trying to do two things at once. Governments and the civic institutions within them want development, and they want to protect from development. The population want agency over the government: some of us desire freedom from regulations; others, freedom to strengthen regulations. It appears our relationship with the land is as binary as ever. Does it owe us its wealth, or do we owe it?
TREE FELLING BY EUROPEANS in Australia began on 27 January 1788, the day after their arrival in Botany Bay, as Tim Bonyhady points out in his elegant The Colonial Earth (2000). Shelter and fire had to be made, and ground cleared, on the orders of His Majesty’s authorities. A few years later, Governors Hunter and Collins ordered some tree felling prohibited, on the basis that it polluted the valuable fresh water. But their concern was for their own resources.
If Ian Turnbull’s destiny was shaped by the compression of historical and cultural legacy, so was Glen Turner’s. One story of country in Australia is what we have done to change it. Another, less known, is the story of how we have loved and protected it.
The root change in paradigm, to the concept that Australian nature was worth state protection, was a long time forming. Like the Australian colony, its soil was in Europe. It was 1856, more than half a century after decades of booming settlement, that one of the first environmental harm cases in Australia was brought by a landowner, Thomas Power, against a tenant farmer who stripped valuable trees from a property without gaining any cultivation. The tenant argued he was just doing things in the Australian custom, rather than the English way. That custom was to cut down a tree.
The English way, ironically, was to adore a tree. Notwithstanding felling for industry and war, fashions back in the old country in the eighteenth century, historian Keith Thomas relates, were to cultivate exotics and cherish British species; to convert frightening forests to cosy gardens; to give trees ‘an almost pet-like status’. Poetic manifestos were published in great masses to protest tree-felling: ‘To future ages, may’st thou stand / Untouched by the rash workman’s hand’, and so on. Under the influence of Rousseau and others, trees, like ‘natural man’, were encouraged to grow in pleasingly ‘wild’ ways. ‘Everyone who has the least pretension to taste,’ wrote one man in 1776, ‘must always prefer a tree in its natural growth.’ The foliage of Britain formed part of mystical and religious sensibility, and suggested eternity, fecundity. People knew their trees.
Despite the confidence of bewigged Whitehall masters, not everyone still assumed that humans had a divine mandate to dominate nature. Instinct drew people to plant for beauty and comfort, rather than simple utility. As the population became increasingly centred in cities and the threat from dangerous beasts receded, many grew nostalgic for the authenticity and plenty of the countryside. From protests against tight trimming of hedges, voices began to condemn tree-felling altogether. These shifts were, as historian Keith Thomas identifies, ‘aspects of a much wider reversal in the relationship of the English to the natural world’. Though it might seem very distant from the grim antagonism of many Australian colonists, that reversal was the seed of the modern environmental and conservationist movements here.
The British Empire, taking possession of the enormous continent of Australia, had an unprecedented opportunity (notwithstanding the Indigenous inhabitants and the insolent convict population) to impose a vast order of land management. But the limits of authority were very quickly made manifest. Governor William Bligh in Sydney was trying, even in 1807, to regulate land use as the township expanded hugely, hoping to preserve open space and give some order to the density of habitations. He was notoriously defeated in this and other reforms, first by the political agitation of his enemies and then by the Rum Rebellion; it was an ill omen for the authority of the state in environmental regulation. And the colony was not here to admire a botanical garden. It was a commercial, administrative and imperial project required to demonstrate its viability.
By the end of that century, Bonyhady says of the irresolute, hypocritical or ineffective legacies of governmental authority, ‘it was a commonplace that colonial governments were incapable of implementing their environmental ideals because of their vulnerability to electoral pressure from colonists concerned with short-term advantage rather than their long-term collective interests’. Little has changed in 220 years. Even before Australia was federated, there were tensions between the mandate of the state and the desires of its citizens. ‘In a rising colony,’ wrote the exasperated Bligh, ‘it is of some importance … that individual convenience should sometimes yield to general regularity and public utility.’
Many settlers mischievously tested the limits of authority. But equally, individuals began to challenge the government when it was incompetent or corrupt. There was even a claim tried, in 1895 in the New South Wales Land Appeal Court,
in regard to ‘the people’s inheritance’ of a healthy environment. These first protests were rare and rarely successful, but they were a beginning.
THE MOMENT NEWS OF Glen Turner’s death came through to Arthur Snook, the OEH thrummed with shock. Some compliance officers were reluctant to leave the office, and voices in the media claiming the death of a state officer was inevitable didn’t help. In the days following the crime, all compliance field operations were suspended in New South Wales. The federal department also put everything on hold. What had been a challenging job had become a deadly one.
Environment minister Stokes and the OEH’s executive officer, Terrence Bailey, met with the Armidale team that Turner had worked with in the past. Chris Nadolny was there, and Turner’s former colleagues from the Environmental Protection Authority were invited in from their adjacent office. Stokes and Bailey spoke sombrely to the shaken staff. They had to acknowledge that one of their number had been killed for doing his job, the same work they were doing.
The OEH considered giving up on continuing to prosecute Ian Turnbull and his family. The man had killed one of their officers, a public servant in the line of his duty, and had explained to witnesses that he was motivated by stopping the investigation. He was claiming his crime was a reaction to persecution, the atrocity a measure of the provocation. He was claiming he had been singled out unjustly. He was banked with Queens’ Counsels, supported by his family. Could the department afford to continue a case against a man who was attracting support as a martyr to its ‘oppressive’ investigation? Could the office afford to continue sending staff into a work environment where their lives could be at risk? Many officers’ field trips involved meeting a landholder who owned a gun.
‘We all put to our OEH chief executive that we have to go ahead with prosecutions,’ says Nadolny. In that meeting, he was still numb from the news. But, as one of the few who knew Ian Turnbull, he spoke up. ‘I said in particular that they were regarding Ian as a mad person, that there was no justification in it. I said, “Well, look, there is justification in it if he could get off the charge.”’
Simon Smith from the EPA spoke up too. The agency, he felt, had contributed to the escalation of hostilities; now it had to respond. ‘“This is basically anarchy,”’ he remembers saying. ‘If you stop now and pull out of this, you’re just condoning anarchy. You’re pulling back so anyone can just threaten an EPA officer or OEH officer, and we’ll run away. That’s not regulation. That’s not a proper response.’
If the OEH had decided not to continue with the prosecutions, the Turnbulls would have cleared their land with impunity. Turnbull would have a stronger case that Turner was a rogue bully; he might go down for manslaughter, instead of murder. Turner’s professional reputation would be injured; the staff would be further demoralised; Turnbull’s neighbours might be encouraged in their illegal clearing. The cycle would continue. The way Chris Nadolny tells it, the urgent commitment of Turner’s colleagues steadied Terrence Bailey’s resolve. Glen had died but his work must be finished. It would be his legacy.
Less than two weeks later, the OEH went ahead with its prosecution of Grant Turnbull for the second batch of clearing on ‘Colorado’, over the latter half of 2012. Six weeks after that, on 19 September, the OEH was in court, seeking remediation orders for that clearing, and an injunction to stop Grant from entering and clearing the parts of ‘Colorado’ that hadn’t yet been pushed. In between the court appearances, Bailey approved yet another inspection of the properties, five weeks after Phil Spark and a journalist had seen the continuing clearing. They got the interim injunction against Grant ‘to restrain any further unlawful clearing or further damage being done to the cleared land’. With the patriarch in jail facing a murder charge, an avalanche of the law was belatedly falling on the Turnbulls.
IN DISTANT SYDNEY AT the same time, policy writers and lobby groups, senators and consultant ecologists were poring over documents that would be another legacy of the encounter between Glen Turner and Ian Turnbull on that winter road. They were notes towards a complete overhaul of the native vegetation protection laws of the state.
When Turnbull faced Turner over the gate at ‘Strathdoon’ back in late 2011, the government was a new Liberal–National coalition under Barry O’Farrell. By the time Turnbull was clearing the last remnants of native vegetation on ‘Colorado’ three years later, Mike Baird was premier. His leadership bid had been supported, according to Phil Spark, by the NSW Farmers Association, allegedly on an understanding that he would help pass legislation to undo some regulations against land clearing. On Baird’s retirement from the premiership in 2017, certainly, NSW Farmers thanked him for the changes to the laws. O’Farrell had helped to establish the Office of Environment and Heritage to administer protections for ecologies. Glen Turner was a compliance officer authorised by a government that had, for most of its history, been on the other side. If Turnbull had cleared fifty years earlier, he would have been legal; if Glen Turner had been a compliance officer then, he might have been urging the pushing of more trees.
THE ROVING, HOMESICK, WEIRD colonial brain wanted connection. Dissociative appreciation of the bush was one method. Australian flora and fauna, those perverse phenomena by which colonists were so embarrassed, came to ornament a continent that boasted of its exceptionality and its youthful zest. Kangaroo and emu were chosen for the Commonwealth coat of arms even as bounties encouraged their killing; Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Rosa Praed, Marcus Clarke and Adam Gordon Lindsay evoked a rural world that actually frightened many of their readers. But plenty of Australian people did love the bush – at least the idea of it, if not the reality.
Gigantic old-growth trees were discovered as felling penetrated deep forest. Such majesty and evident antiquity evoked some of the awe for the past that Europeans felt was miserably lacking in this cathedral-less and castle-less continent. Language began to show a sense of belonging and investment in the land: some did sense they were the watershed for the future. The term ‘heritage’ came to be used.
And if the empire taught that its subjects were backwards, imitative, derivative, provincial, barbarian and marginal, Australians embraced this renegade status. It was our heritage. As Rebecca Solnit muses in her work on emigration and identity, A Book of Migrations (1997), the outlier-ness of imperial colonies is claimed and flipped by postcolonial nationalisms: ‘A nationalist movement or and independence movement is an assertion by its promulgators that theirs is a center, not a periphery.’
Colonists, Solnit suggests, emphasised the ‘wildness’ of the territory they worked upon. ‘They were ultimately producing another first-world fantasy: the uninhabited “virgin” wilderness that still exists in many wildlife and nature documentaries … and in the fantasies of would-be discoverers then and now.’ This potent and enduring fallacy also abides in the foundations of Australian environmentalism.
In modern times, many a tourism campaign has photographed white Australians standing on rocky outcrops, gazing rapturously across a chasm of red rocks or green peaks into a radiant distance that dissolves like an epiphany. The forests of Tasmania and Far North Queensland, the epic central deserts, rushing rivers and bush-covered mountains, are our glory, the kind of thing we boast about to European cousins sitting miserably in Birmingham or Catania. We have deserts you can die in before you’ve finished walking a tenth of their span; forests as opaque and menacing as anything in a German fairytale; we have droughts and flooding rains. Our wildlife can make you gasp at its wonders or kill you in an instant. Australia, with its ‘beauty and its terror’, we teach ourselves, is exceptional. Our wilderness, we like to brag, is wild.
For some, the wilderness was the stage that set off the gallantry of its humans, the cast of a patriotic national saga. For others, the wilderness was, in its defiance and endurance and vulnerability, our secret treasure, a mystery to be unlocked; a vast, quiet patrimony.
We killed and ran off the first inheritors of that patrimony. We demolished much
of the work they had done, and devastated much else. Could the rest be salvaged, and would it welcome our protection? Might it ever forgive us? These were the questions that gradually emerged over the twentieth century, in what very gradually evolved into environmental and conservation movements.
There are countless conservation groups in Australia today. They all cherish the idea of wilderness and work devotedly to protect nature under threat. The people who support those causes try to conceive of intricate relationships of ecologies; they may work in offices and meeting rooms, or out in the field, researching, safeguarding and even blockading; some live in natural environments or remote areas. The great majority, like the general population, are non-Indigenous. And they sometimes forget what Jay Griffiths reminded herself: that indigenous peoples ‘have a different word for wilderness: home’.
The Indigenous Australian continent was not self-willed. It, too, had been shaped, maintained, curated. It was not wild, but it was not domesticated, either. Non-Indigenous Australians sometimes struggle to parse the difference. A humanless landscape may not be pristine but evacuated; ecstatic fecundity may actually be damage; quickly, one’s assumptions become tangled as weed. We love our wilderness distant not only for its romance but the remoteness of its questions.
Are ‘we’, mostly non-Indigenous Australian descendants of settlers and colonists and migrants, the new custodians of Australian nature? Are we culprits or their repentant opponents? Do we want to be – should we be – custodians, diligently repairing damage done, or, wary of causing further inadvertent harm, should we leave nature to fix itself? Is nature in need of our support, or is it the fierce and enduring legacy of millions of years of evolution, battered but ultimately impervious to our pathetic attitudes? And the biggest question of all: should we think of European settlement as a good thing or a bad?